… the Defense Department needs a common platform for AI development and application. A development platform will bring data, AI developers, and the military into a single ecosystem to develop AI at speed and scale. The Pentagon should also make significant changes to its acquisition approach by overhauling intellectual property ownership, modernizing contractor solicitation and payment, and rebalancing a mix of relationships with large, medium, and small-sized AI development companies.
That was from a great article by the JAIC’s Matt Cook, “The Humble Task of Implementation is the Key to AI Dominance.” Here’s another good part:
Ultimately, an AI model that is fielded once and never updated is useless; in those cases, it is better not to use AI solutions at all.
And:
During my experience on the team responding to wildfires, we faced a relatively simple yet debilitating problem: We were not allowed to bring in the latest versions of vendor-preferred tools like PyTorch, which was vital to our model development. Instead, we were forced to make our vendors use an older version, since that was the only information assurance-approved tool suite available.
I feel like I remember Kessel Run having solved some of that problem of bringing on commercial software tools, and I want to say that I remember it on this Contracting Experience podcast episode with Tory Cuff. Perhaps that was more about selecting and onboarding quickly rather than getting continuous updates to the software approved.
You’d think by now the DoD would have accepted the fact that outdated software tools is a fairly sure path to cyber insecurity. Say I know defense developers use a particular software tool, and that a new patch closes certain loopholes. If the DoD won’t update until much later, then I know exactly how to exploit the software!
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